


The Man from Room Five

by Greeeeny



Category: V for Vendetta (2005), V for Vendetta - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Freedom Fighters, Headcanon, Larkhill Detention Centre, Medical Experimentation, Medical Torture, Miscarriage, Norsefire, Revenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-04
Updated: 2015-02-04
Packaged: 2018-03-10 10:55:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3287669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Greeeeny/pseuds/Greeeeny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She dragged herself along like a wounded dog and her eyes met a dark figure, walking through a wall of starved flames.<br/>Although she couldn’t see them, she could feel a pair of eyes scrutinising her, looking down upon her just like she had once.<br/>It was him.<br/>The Man from Room Five.<br/>“Wha- What have I done?” Stanton whispered to herself.<br/>And V, reborn, flesh burnt severely and barely standing on his feet, propelled his arms up into the dark, starry and cold November night and let out a hoarse howl.<br/>A howl that would haunt Diana for the rest of her life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Man from Room Five

**Author's Note:**

> A brief imagining of what V would've been like before his time in Larkhill and before all of the unfortunate experimentation that left him unfortunately batshit crazy and puuuuur-fect. I purposefully haven't given V a name as I would've chosen something ridiculous. This was meant to be very ambiguous so the reader could also weave in their own assumptions into the story.
> 
> I secretly find myself liking Diana, or Delia if you will. God, I'm so terrible...

Unbeknownst to the man who wore the Guy Fawkes mask almost like a second skin – almost like his own, he was once an individual, a person with a name, a family and a past. Not until he recovered the diary of Delia Surridge and tore out the pages containing information on his background before leaving it for Inspector Finch.

 

Known to us only simply as V, he was born into a middle class family who had plenty of savings but were not at all materialistic and vouched for a simpler life. It was a family consisting of an overly good looking father without even a single drop of bad blood in his veins and an equally beautiful mother who doted on her son and her two other daughters.

 

V was a relatively quiet infant and remained so for the majority of his childhood. He rarely threw tantrums and had an ear for music and was fond of completing the crosswords that would be in the daily newspaper. He excelled at mathematics and loved learning various languages – his favourite being French. As a child he was kind on the eyes with a head of short curly light brown hair and an infectious smile that earned his parents much praise on passing on their good genes.

 

As a teenager, puberty wasn’t as kind to him as it had been to his sisters and V found himself worrying about his appearance. His hair had turned darker and had become greasy, his facial features and bone structure had failed to transition and sculpt properly, his shoulders had become broader but he had failed to fill out properly like all of the other boys he found himself envying but the infectious smile still remained. On first glance V wasn’t exactly a looker but a second look would reveal a sort of hidden elegance and beauty to his appearance – almost mysterious and entirely beguiling.

 

Sometime after his seventeenth birthday, V became infatuated with a Jewish girl of similar social standing and the two fell in love. He received his first kiss shortly thereafter and had mutually agreed to make love at a later time, preferably after marriage out of chivalry and respect for her strict parents.

 

V graduated secondary school with good marks and was eligible to attend Cambridge but instead found work as a second-in-charge at a small, family-owned cinema. His love for the art of film was conditioned here and he found himself enjoying a wide variety of films and was deeply engrossed in them.

 

After his twenty-first birthday, V proposed to his love and the couple wed secretly not long after in a quick marriage performed by a minister at the City Hall.

 

The marriage was not met positively by a lot of people, particularly in a time of rising tension in Britain and the Civil War in America, but the young couple turned a blind eye and moved to London to begin their lives together. The young couple found new jobs and had a modest income, affording them a comfortable abode just on the outskirts of the city. Two years later, the pair was met with the news that they were going to become parents and V was more than overjoyed.

 

However, the ecstasy was met with its own downfall with the election of the Norsefire party and all of the occurrences happening in the country – the St. Mary’s virus and all of the terrorist activity – which V knew was fishy but kept his mouth shut.

 

And then the terror truly began.

 

V and his wife had originally thought that they weren’t going to be touched and would to see the day they were their child walk its first steps and say its first word, but life and destiny had taken a cruel turn.

 

V’s father was detained for his political views and was treated with ‘enhanced interrogation’ which eventually weeded out the information of V’s marriage to a Jewish woman and various other family members, friends and acquaintances associated with the Norsefire and Fascist resistance. V’s sisters were detained for their participation in the riots in Leeds and his mother and father followed soon after.

 

He never learned of their fates as the fear, the horror started to consume his life.

 

He left his job and sought protection by applying for asylum wherever he could – of course they were all rejected as other nations saw it best not to meddle with Britain and with the Norsefire.

 

Then one icy December night, the Norsefire pigs burst into their home. First they took V’s heavily pregnant wife and beat her brutally in front of him. They beat her until the colour purple consumed her arms, her face and legs and until the colour of crimson started to stain the floor beneath her.

 

She was gone as was the child within her, or “The sow and rotten spawn” as the Norsefire’s secret police had commented bitterly shortly before drawing a black bag over V’s head, blackening out everything and anything that had remained of his life.

 

What he remembered from that moment on was bright lights, injections, the scornful laughing of medical doctors, death, lice, his bones cracking, his muscles faltering and an everlasting fire in his body that refused to go out even as he begged a God he didn’t believe in his to show mercy and take his life.

 

The taste of acid and hatred was always in V’s mouth from the first time he laid eyes on the lead doctor of Larkhill, Diana Stanton.

 

He hated her even though V’s parents had taught him to empathise with even the most despicable specimens of the human race. He hated the way she looked upon him with such… dissatisfaction and futility.

 

After a session of being injected with various chemicals, V heard her commenting to another colleague outside his cell: “The Man from Room Five,” Diana said, that darn tone of disappointment still lingering in her voice, “He’s not good looking at all, is he? He’s quite ugly.”

 

V, certain parts of his body paralysed from the needles, only bit his tongue out of red hot fury and felt a stream of salty and warm blood pooling in his mouth.

 

Lewis Prothero was also another devil that made V’s stay at Larkhill largely unpleasant and torturous.

 

When confined to the four walls of his cell, huddled in the corner in a potato sack and arms around his now knobbly knees, V could hear the moans of people in the cells next to him writhing in pain after having been beaten by Prothero and the screams and cries of those being attended to by him.

 

Father Lilliman, was also another person that made V’s insides curl. A sick bastard he was and what little ‘spiritual support’ he provided. It was obvious that he was being paid well and the many nights that V went sleepless, he plotted within the darkest corners of his mind the many ways he would get retribution against his captors and avenge the people they had taken from him.

 

But then certain parts of his mind started to flicker – the blacks turned to white and the whites turned to black.

 

Soon he could feel something changing within him, whether it was physical or just something mental.

 

He felt… alive.

 

But there were the moments where he forgot his name, forgot his hometown and birth date and then remembered them a few minutes, hours or days later.

 

Out of panic he confided this revelation to the one person he would not have thought of confiding in, Diana Stanton.

 

Then, Stanton’s expression changed – no longer was V just the ‘Man from Room Five’. He was the Key; the Key to human perfection and the Key to Stanton’s dream.

 

Not long after V had completely forgotten who he was and only identified himself by one letter:

 

V, V, V, V, V, V, V…

 

Stanton then started to bring V various puzzles, cross-words, Rubik’s cubes and various other tests and to her bewilderment, the Man from Room Five had developed a superior intellect and that night when Stanton retreated to the safety and comfort of her office, a crooked smile crept on her then-young face.

 

V then asked for permission to begin gardening – a request that befuddled Stanton and had Prothero laughing breathlessly when she asked him. He reluctantly said yes and Prothero couldn’t have known that he had allowed V’s plan to go ahead and that it would result in his death a decade or two from then on.

 

V, with his superior intellect and enhanced physiology worked tirelessly on the small plot of dirt that was allocated to him to grow various vegetables and fruits but also an array of flora.

 

Stanton looked on as V plucked weeds and watered the plot, a varnish of sweat dazzling off of his now well-defined and proportionate body. She was entranced by the perfection she had created and looked at him with eyes not of pity or discontent, but of marvel, of wonder and also a light sense of admiration and eroticism.

 

No, Stanton never admired V the way he had admired his late wife. She only admired the perfect specimen she had built – but little did she know, she had created a monster. A caged animal that would bite the hand that fed it.

 

Stanton, impressed thoroughly by the quality of the produce started to give the prisoner small little gifts, small acts which were remnants of humanity that was bleached from her soul when she herself became a prisoner of Norsefire.

 

The first gift was a wife beater and pair of trousers which would replace the meagre potato sack he wore.

 

The second was a bath, an actual bath, and not the powdering V had to endure along with the other prisoners in order to avoid break outs of lice.

 

The third was a small block of chocolate.

 

And the fourth was a brief five minute walk outside the walls of the detention centre with Stanton and five other secret police members walking a few metres behind him.

 

For V, he was no one and he couldn’t comprehend these things that Stanton was giving him.

 

Was he meant to feel grateful?

 

Was he meant to feel shame or guilt?

 

He didn’t know because he couldn’t feel distinct emotions anymore, just the aches in his muscles after a day of gardening or facing a beating from Prothero, not because he had done anything wrong, but just because Prothero felt like it and received sadistic pleasure from seeing the muted distress and discomfort in Stanton’s eyes when she was there to witness it.

 

Then came Valerie’s note written on toilet paper shoved through the hole of V’s cell. An autobiography that was meant entirely for V and then he felt something, a determination, a warm feeling that engulfed the confinement of his chest.

 

V started to smuggle in pesticides into his cell which was seldom ever checked on by anyone and V started to plan out his revenge out meticulously, one domino at a time.

 

He picked out a date at random and continued on with his life of imprisonment, slaving over the gardens that were handed so blindly to him and very carefully attended to the Scarlet Carsons that he had planted explicitly for Valerie’s memory.

 

The explosion broke out on the 5th of November, just a little under a year of V’s incarceration. The medical section was the first to be blown to smithereens.

 

The entire camp was taken by surprise and soon enough it was engulfed in flames and the fumes of pesticides and burning flesh.

 

Of all, there couldn’t have been an individual more surprised, shocked and devastated than Diana Stanton.

 

All of her work… her hard work.. incinerating in a hungry blaze and wondering whether her creation had survived, whether he was O.K.

 

She grovelled on debris and burning pieces of paper and over people, trying to free herself of the destruction around her.

 

She dragged herself along like a wounded dog and her eyes met a dark figure, walking through a wall of starved flames.

 

Although she couldn’t see them, she could feel a pair of eyes scrutinising her, looking down upon her just like she had once.

 

It was him.

 

The Man from Room Five.

 

“Wha- What have I done?” Stanton whispered to herself.

 

And V, reborn, flesh burnt severely and barely standing on his feet, propelled his arms up into the dark, starry and cold November night and let out a hoarse howl.

 

A howl that would haunt Diana for the rest of her life.


End file.
